Julián Castro is Resetting the Latino Image in Iowa

By ART CULLEN

STORM LAKE, Iowa — Julián Castro strode onto Lake Avenue’s ice Saturday morning, right on time, with his slick new San Antonio black shoes and no long johns as Iowa descended into the paralysis of a prairie blizzard.

“I gotta get some new clothes,” he told the crowd of about 60 Anglo people packed into Better Day Café after delivering a cheery “¡Buenos dias!”

Everyone said they liked him.

“I liked his answers,” said Cary Boyd.

Who knows who will win Iowa, but give credit to the man who comes when others steer clear. He is virtually unknown by the polls, a former Texas mayor and Barack Obama Housing and Urban Development secretary, now 44 years old, just over half the age of the poll leaders Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

He should not be counted out.

“I didn’t grow up a front-runner,” Castro said.

His grandmother came to Eagle Pass from Mexico when she was 7 years old. Legally, the grandson learned. She was a single mother to Castro’s mother, who in turn reared Julián and twin Joaquin (a congressman) as a single mom in San Antonio. They were not born front-runners, but worked their way to it through law school and then politics.

Julián is ever polite, smiling, self-deprecating and unassuming. He thanks his aide for sugar in his tea. He does not want to be written off as the token Latino so he does not lead with border issues or human rights for indigenous people. He talks universal health care (Medicare for all, if you will), free state university tuition and a Green New Deal that takes on big oil. Very much the progressive, but not as overtly populist as Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. His first emphasis is unity, to bring people together.

You could almost say he is deferential, until he mentions President Donald Trump in an interview and says the administration conducts “state-sponsored kidnapping” of the children of refugees at the border.

His view of the border is fundamentally different. He sees the flows of generations of people fleeing poverty and persecution, where the Trump administration sees a threat to national security.

He does not defer to his Democratic opponents, either.

“The Latino community has never really seen a candidacy like mine,” Castro told me.

He says they will claim their stake if he is running.

He knows it will be a struggle, a familiar story to him that he plans to tell in all 50 states — not just Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

He was not surprised that so few Latinos showed up Saturday — first, because the weather was so miserable, and second, out of fear. He says Latinos don’t caucus because many prefer not to be seen. He is enthusiastic about changes to the Iowa rules that will allow absentee or online balloting.

“People with papers, who are citizens, want to avoid getting hassled,” Castro said. It’s part of the everyday thinking in the Latino community, he said.

Castro wants to inspire people of color, and especially Latinos, that they can make a difference, and he believes that he can help by changing the narrative about Latino men.

“I am going to show the American people that this generation of Latinos has been making and will make very positive contributions to our society — in the way that they work hard, that they are people of faith, and that we are people of service,” Castro said in an interview.

Win or lose, Castro is attempting to change the fraught story of how Latin Americans in the United States are perceived.

“That’s why I came back to Storm Lake. It’s very special to be here in a community that can teach other communities about what this nation can do,” he told the crowd.

Immediately, then, he recalled visiting a detention facility at Eagle Pass, where women and children were separated from husbands and fathers. He can appreciate that feeling.

“That’s not who we are,” he told Storm Lake, a town of about 15,000 where most of the meatpacking workers are brown, and where the school is 90 percent immigrant. “This is who we are.”

That message worked for a biracial senator from Illinois who won the White House from long odds on a cold Iowa day in front of the state capitol. For Castro, fairness can report that he has already succeeded by virtue of running; for voters in the Iowa primary, he may be redefining their view of what it means to be American. That does not sell him short in the least.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in Northwest Iowa. His book, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper, was published by Viking Press. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2019

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